The Cottage of Delight: A Novel

John sat down in his room one night to answer this letter, but, though he tried very hard, he could think of little to say. Cavanaugh's simple phrases had sounded his deepest emotional depths, and yet he could not bring himself to write an appropriate response. He started to mention the death of Binks, but gave that up. That, he argued, would only cause his old friend to be the more deeply concerned over his welfare. So he wrote the most cheerful letter of which he was capable, about his activity in business matters, and his ability to look on the bright side of such things as the absence of Dora and his unmarried state. He ended the letter with this:

CHAPTER VII

"Humph!" Cavanaugh sniffed, and looked at his wife. "This load is twice as big as any dollar load I ever bought, and will throw out twice as much heat to the square inch. I'll tell you, Joel, I've got a two-dollar bill that is burning a hole in my pocket, and it goes for this load of wood or you have me to whip. We are out of stove-wood, too, and I don't want any dickering from you about it."

Joel flushed under his tattered straw hat. "It isn't worth that much," he declared, tapping the ground with his whip.

"It is worth it to me, Joel," Cavanaugh smiled, "so what can you do about it? I won't take double value from any man, much less you. How is Tilly?"

"She is fairly well, thank you," the farmer replied.

"And the little ones?" Mrs. Cavanaugh asked, with a motherly smile.

"They are both all right, thank you," Joel said, his undecided glance on his wood. Then, to his surprise, the contractor came through the gate, took the reins from his hands, and drove the horse with its load around to the gate at the side of the house. Halting there, Cavanaugh began to throw the wood over the fence.

"Let him have his way, Joel," Mrs. Cavanaugh said, smiling. "He'd be miserable if he got anything too cheap from an old friend like you. Before you start home, come in; I've made two little waists for the children from a pattern Tilly lent me the last time she was in. I hope they will fit."

"You are always doing things like that, and yet want me to take double price for my produce," Joel said, frowning. "Something is wrong somewhere, Mrs. Cavanaugh."

The old woman laughed lightly. "Go help Sam throw off the wood, Joel," she said. "Don't tell me I haven't the right to sew for little children when I have none of my own. I love your two, and what I do for them has nothing to do with you."

With a look of blended pleasure and pain, Joel joined Cavanaugh, and together they unloaded the wagon. When it was empty Joel shook the bits of bark and chips from the plank flooring, and stared at the contractor timidly. "There is a matter I want to ask you about, Mr. Cavanaugh," he began, clearing his throat. "It is a serious thing for me, and my wife, too. I've wanted to mention it for several days—in fact, since I first heard of it. I really don't know whether I have the right to ask you, and if I haven't you must stop me. Mr. Cavanaugh, all sorts of stories have been floating about to the effect that—that my wife's—that John Trott's reported death was a mistake, and that—and that you went up to New York to—"

Joel broke off. He was quite agitated.

"I know what you mean," Cavanaugh put into the break. "How did you hear it?"

"My neighbors are all talking about it," said Eperson, laboriously, his face now grim and fixed. "I went to Todd Williams and asked him about it. All he could tell me was that he saw a man in New York that looked like John Trott, but he said it might have been only a fancy. Of course, I've kept the talk from Tilly as much as possible. I asked our neighbors not to mention it to her and they promised, but—but—"

"You think she has heard it?" Cavanaugh submitted, gravely.

Eperson nodded. A grim expression twisted his lips awry and left them quivering as he spoke. "Yes, I think some part of it, at least, has reached her. I saw a change in her last night when she came back from a visit to the Creswells. She didn't mention it to me, but I was watching her and I saw a change. She was excited. I think I might call it excitement, Mr. Cavanaugh, and she didn't sleep well last night. She got up several times, and it seemed to me once that she was about to speak to me about it, but still she didn't."

"I see, I see," said Cavanaugh, slowly. "Well, Joel, I hardly know what is right to do in a matter as delicate as this is, but still right is right, and if there is anybody in the world that ought to know the truth about this, why, it is you and Tilly. Joel, the truth is, John Trott and Dora are both still alive."

"Then, then, it is true?"

"Yes, Joel; I've just had a letter from John and he wants the facts known. But I don't see that there is any reason for you to be disturbed. You see, the law parted John and Tilly years ago, and even if it hadn't, his long desertion (we'll call it that) would have amounted to the same in any court."

Like an automaton which all but creaked in its joints, Joel took up his reins. Tapping his thin horse with his whip and making a clucking sound between his teeth, he turned his wagon around.

"Wait! You haven't been paid yet," Cavanaugh cried, holding out a bill.

Pausing, a flurried, far-away look in his eyes, Joel took the money.

"Thank you—thank you," he ejaculated. "So there's no doubt about it? Did you actually see him, Mr. Cavanaugh—with your own eyes, I mean? I don't want any hearsay or second-hand report. I want the truth—the facts."

"I spent a week with him, Joel."

Eperson wound the lines around his left hand and brought his desperate eyes back to Cavanaugh's face. "There is one thing more," he gulped, his hand at his throat. "Is he—is John Trott a—a married man?"

"No, Joel; he's single. Marrying didn't seem to be—well, exactly in his line. His time has been taken up with a growing business, his books, a pet dog, and Dora. She was like a loving sister, I understand, till she married a man she loved and moved out of the country. John is a sort of—well, you might say a sort of stay-at-home, soured old bachelor that never took much to women. At least that's the way I size him up. He makes plenty of money, and has laid up some, but I don't think he cares much for it. He's odd—a sort of deep-feeling fellow—different from the general run of men."

In a nervous sort of movement Joel wiped his lips with his hand.

"There is a thing I'd like to know," he said, slowly, impressively, frankly. "You say he is single, and that makes me wonder. Mr. Cavanaugh, truth is truth, and, as you say, right is right; would you mind telling me whether you think he has—has changed—well, in regard to his—his feeling toward Tilly?"

"You are asking me a ticklish question," Cavanaugh said, with a start and a dropping of his honest eyes. "You see, John never came right out and talked plain on that line, and—"

"I was only asking for your personal opinion," emphasized Joel; "in talking with him did you gather that—that his sentiments had undergone no change since he left here?"

"I don't see what good it will do," the old man said, "but since you insist on knowing I may as well admit that I didn't see any change. In my opinion, Joel, he loves her even more than he did. He didn't say so, you understand, but that's what I gathered. I was watching him when I told him about you and her getting married, and I must say I pitied him. I don't know why, but I did. He looked so downcast, and, you might say, almost astonished."

With the groping movement of a man in the dark, Eperson started to get into his wagon, but was stopped by Mrs. Cavanaugh.

"Wait, Joel!" she called out. "You are forgetting these things," and she brought them to him wrapped up in paper. "Give Tilly my love and tell her if the waists don't fit I can take them in or let them out."

"Thank you; you are very, very, kind." Joel had lifted his hat, and, with a hand that seemed bloodless, he took the parcel and put it into his wagon, carefully covering it with his coat. He made no effort toward starting on again, and, as there was an opening for it, Cavanaugh said to his wife:

"I've just been telling him about John, and it seems to me that Joel is sorter worried about—about its effect on Tilly."

Eperson nodded as if acquiescing to a statement too delicate to be discussed, and remained silent, a wilted look of despair on him.

"I see, I see," Mrs. Cavanaugh said. "I was wondering how she would take it. She's never been exactly like other women. Few women would have—have, you know what I mean, Joel—would have acted like she has all along in regard to John's mother. I must say, and I know that you will agree with me, that she showed herself to be a wonderfully good Christian woman. Why, sometimes it looked to me like she loved Mrs. Trott more than she did even her own mother. But she's been rewarded—oh, you know she's been gloriously rewarded! Your sweet little wife, Joel, has saved the very soul and body of a lone, lost woman. But you helped—oh yes! if it hadn't been for you she never could have done it. And you deserve your reward, too. In my opinion you have been a man amongst a million in all you have done in that matter."

"I don't deserve your praise, Mrs. Cavanaugh," Eperson sighed. "I did it all for Tilly. She was unhappy till we began to help Mrs. Trott. I saw where the trouble lay, and did a little, that's all."

"And are you worried about how Tilly will take the news about John?" Mrs. Cavanaugh asked, while her husband hung open-mouthed on Eperson's answer.

"I don't know how exactly to make you understand the—the situation," Joel stammered. "But I reckon I may as well say, and be done with it, that—that—" He went no farther, his words piling one upon another on his helpless tongue, his great, tender eyes bulging from their dark-ringed sockets.

"You can't mean that she would be worried about the divorce." Mrs. Cavanaugh feebly came to his assistance. "Sam and I were talking that over. There is no doubt that it was legal in every way. Old Whaley saw to that. Narrow-minded and hard as he was, he acted for the best in that case."

"I see you don't understand." Joel dug the toe of his coarse shoe into a tuft of grass and mechanically pounded it with his heel. "You don't understand, because you don't know Tilly as well as I do. Mrs. Cavanaugh, how can I put it any better than to—to say that—no matter what was done in court, no matter what John Trott did that might be called 'desertion,' Tilly would never have married again if she had thought he was alive. I'd never have dared to ask her to marry me if I hadn't thought he was dead. I believed it—from the bottom of my soul I believed it, and—and, my friends, listen! I got her to believe it. I saw that she doubted it a little, and I worked and worked, and argued and argued, till finally I got her to believe it. But even then I'd have failed if Mrs. Trott hadn't—hadn't helped me. Mrs. Trott believed he was dead, and it was her belief and my talk that finally convinced Tilly. But now what is to be done?"

"Why, nothing that I can see," Mrs. Cavanaugh answered. "All you have to do is to show Tilly that in no sense of the word is she bound by her first marriage. You seem to think she is worried over that."

Joel shrugged his shoulders and took a deep breath. "You don't understand yet," he said, with a low groan. "She is excited—so excited that she can't sleep, but it is not the kind of excitement you think it is. She's heard the report that John Trott is still alive and she is afraid that it may not—by some chance—be true. I don't mean that she'd ever live with him again—now that she is—is a mother, or that she'd hold it against me for marrying her as I did; but to know that no harm came to him will make her happier than she's been for many a day. That is a thing I've got to face. She is the mother of my children, but she has never given me her whole heart and soul. She gave them to John Trott. She has never blamed him for any step he took. She thought that he left here for her sake, and died for her sake. Do you think I don't know that when she hears that he himself has never married in all these years—do you think that she will then love him less than she did? She always looked on him as the most wronged man alive. Do you suppose that she herself will turn against him now? In the name of God, what excuse would she have, and him still loving her as Mr. Cavanaugh thinks he does?"

"I never looked at it that way," Mrs. Cavanaugh said. "You are getting me all mixed up. Does Mrs. Trott— Have any of the reports got to her?"

"No, not yet; but Tilly will want to tell her, now that there is no doubt as to the truth. I must tell my wife what I have just learned. It is my duty to tell her. Yes, yes, I must tell her. I'm honor-bound at once to give her all the joy in my power."

It was as if both Cavanaugh and his wife could think of nothing in the way of comfort for Eperson, and, taking his reins into a better grasp and touching his hat politely, he mounted his wagon and drove away.

CHAPTER VIII

Tilly came to the front door and stood watching them as they drew nearer. The sun was going down, and its last slanting rays made a living picture of her in the crude frame of logs. She looked older than the average woman of her age, and yet there was a rounded mellowness to her features, a suave, spiritual radiance from her skin, eyes, and hair, which always caught and held the attention of an observer. The same quality seemed to pervade her voice. It had always been musical; it was even more so now. Her husband saw that she was all aglow and smiling as she stepped down to the wagon and held out her arms for the little girl.

"Not a long ride, was it, pet?" she said, as the child put its arms around her neck and kissed her cheek.

Taking up the parcel, Joel handed it to his wife. "Mrs. Cavanaugh sent it," he explained. "It is the waists."

"Mrs. Cavanaugh?" Tilly said, in groping surprise. "Where did you see her?"

"I sold Cavanaugh the wood." Joel felt the heat flow into his cheeks. "He ordered it a week ago."

"Was he—was he at home?" Tilly held the child's face to hers, and Joel noted a tense ripple of expectation in her voice.

"Yes, he was there." Joel lowered his head to take up the reins he had dropped, preparatory to driving around to the wagon-shed. From the corner of his eyes he saw that Tilly stood rigid at his side, and he thought he knew why she lingered thus. He was starting his horse, when she said, suddenly:

"Well, come right in. Your supper is ready."

As he put his horse into its stall and fed it with fodder and corn, he almost wished that he could prolong the task, for how was he to pass through the coming ordeal, which was like death to him?

He went into the house, bathed his face in a pan of water, brushed his long thin hair, carefully adjusted his collar, and put on his coat. As a rule, farmers did not wear their coats in the house in warm weather, but Joel had never sat at the table with his wife without having his on. It was an observance of respect to women which had been handed down to Joel from conventional forebears, and from which he could not have departed.

Tilly and the children were at the table. It had grown dark within the almost windowless cabin, and an oil-lamp furnished the light, the yellow rays of which fell over the food, which consisted of boiled vegetables, cornbread, butter, and mush and milk for the children.

Out of respect to Tilly, who always did it in his absence, Joel, when at home, said grace at the table, and the upturned plates to-night mutely reminded him of that duty.

It had always been the same simple formula which, also, had descended to Joel, and over his folded hands to-night he uttered it. Moistening his dry lips as if to render them pliant, Eperson sent his prayer out into the sentient mystery which was so relentlessly wrapping him about.

"Loving Father," he prayed, "we thank Thee, this night, for all the evidence of Thy loving tenderness and care. Bless this food to our needs. Render us kind and merciful to our neighbors, and, when our earthly service to Thee is ended, receive us into the grace and peace of Thy eternal kingdom. Amen."

Eperson forced himself to eat. Under the stress of his emotions his appetite had departed, and yet he pretended to be enjoying his food. Tilly was eating with more relish, it seemed to him, than usual, and he thought he knew the psychological reason for it. He had never seen her look so buoyantly ethereal as she did to-night. To have described the change upon her would have been beyond the power of man. She was like an older sister to her children. Her love for them seemed to issue from her like some supernal blending of light and music as she bent to adjust the bib of the younger one, or sweetly to admonish the older in regard to his too rapid eating of his mush and milk.

"Don't—don't hurry, Joie darling!" her lilting voice produced. "You don't want to be like a little piggy at his trough, do you, my sweet boy?"

When supper was over, Tilly washed the dishes and Eperson put the children to bed, removing their moist clothing, bathing their bare, dusty feet and legs, and putting on their nightgowns. What a holy service of resignation it was to-night! Why was he so depressed with a sense of his vast paternal unworthiness? Why, unless he was thinking of John Trott's success? He told himself that his whole life had been a failure. Many of his personal debts were unpaid and unpayable. There were men he dreaded meeting because they always asked for the money due them, or showed by their faces that they were thinking of his delinquency. And there were others harder to meet who showed by their faces and the matters they spoke about that they had no thought of ever being paid. Ah! then there were still other men—men from whom he could not bring himself to borrow. They were the few, like Cavanaugh, who wanted to help him, but did not know how to broach so delicate a subject with so sensitive a man.

The children tucked away in the general sleeping-room, Eperson went outside to the chairs that stood by the door-step and sat waiting for Tilly. Would she come to him as promptly as usual? he wondered, his stare on the blinking stars beyond the hilltops. Perhaps not so readily, for an ineffable veil seemed to have been lowered between him and her since her talk with the neighbors in regard to her first husband's survival. He listened for the clatter of dishes and pans in the kitchen. It had ceased. That work was over. Now, nothing would detain her, he told himself, and he tried to brace his courage for the performance before him.

But she did not come at once. He heard her voice, with its indescribable gurgle of maternal sweetness, teaching the children to say their prayers.

"God bless mother," was repeated after her, "God bless father—God bless Grandmother Trott, and all the good people in the world. Amen."

"Grandmother Trott!" Joel's whole weary being throbbed with the mental utterance of the words. Then he heard Tilly singing a quaint lullaby sung by the negroes. He wondered if she were purposely delaying her usual after-supper chat with him. After all, what was there to tell her? She had evidently heard the main facts of the matter—that was plain from that irrepressible elation of hers.

She extinguished the light and came out to him, taking the chair he stood holding for her. The starlight gleamed on his bare brow. It was like a well-wrought piece of granite. He brushed his hair back with an unsteady hand as he sat down.

"I was talking with Cavanaugh," he began, and paused to clear the huskiness from his throat.

"I know," Tilly said. "I've heard everything."

"You have?" Joel said, tremulously.

"Yes, the Creswells told me yesterday. You see, Tom Creswell works in the post-office, and the postmaster showed him and the other clerks a letter that Mr. Cavanaugh was sending to John since he got back from New York. Then the postmaster showed him one answering it. The postmaster met Mr. Cavanaugh and asked him about it, and Mr. Cavanaugh told him that it was all a mistake about John and Dora being killed. He says John is doing well and looks well. Oh, I'm so glad—so glad! Ever since the report of that wreck it has been on my mind like a horrible dream. Night and day it would come up to haunt me. Don't you see, I thought— I felt that if—if I had not gone away that day with my father John would have been alive. So now, you see, I haven't that to think about. God spared him and Dora, and Mattie Creswell says they are both happily married."

"Both?" Joel exclaimed. "You haven't got it right, Tilly. Dora married and left him all alone. Cavanaugh says John never married."

"Never married?" Tilly's sweet lips hung quivering. "But Mattie Creswell says her brother told her that Cavanaugh said that John was married to a wealthy girl in high society."

"It is my duty to tell you the truth," Eperson said, the look of death deepening on him. "He never married. He has been leading a strange, lonely life. I think I know why. You can guess."

"I can guess?" Tilly was pale and trembling as she leaned toward him.

"Well, no, perhaps you can't," Joel corrected, "but I know why."

"You know why?" Tilly's voice broke on the last word, and she stared at him eagerly, her sweet mouth drooping.

"Yes, because no man who was once your husband even for the few days that you were his could ever marry any other woman."

"You—you rate me too highly," Tilly faltered, putting her hands over her face. "Why, why, I've always thought that till his death he hated me for deserting him as I did when all the rest of the world was down on him."

"He is no fool, and he was not even then, boy though he was. He knew why you went away so suddenly. Do you hear me? He simply acted as I would have done in his place. He endeavored to set you free from certain unbearable conditions, and that is what I would have done. In setting you free he rescued another girl from a life of degradation and despair, but that is neither here nor there. John Trott deserves credit, and I shall give it to him. Dead though you thought he was, he has always had your heart. I've seen that in a thousand things you have done and said. Your love for his mother was due to that, and God knows you've had your reward there, for you awakened an immortal soul and have earned its eternal gratitude and love. Don't think I am complaining, Tilly. I knew when you came to me that your heart was not mine. I've never been able to win it and I never shall."

"Why, you don't think—you don't think—" stammered Tilly. "Surely you don't think that I still—still—" She suddenly stopped and stared at her husband in a bewildered way. "You don't suppose, Joel, that I could believe that he—that all these years John—"

Joel slowly swung his head up and down. "I believe that you both love each other still. I was wrong to over-persuade you when you held out so long against me. John Trott acted for your good in leaving, and I should not have saddled on you myself, the greatest failure among men that ever lived. I feel to-night as if the blight of an avenging God is on me for my presumption. I have put two little children on your hands and feel as incapable of protecting you and them as a crawling infant."

"I won't listen to you!" Tilly stood up. "You shall not abuse yourself in this way. You acted exactly as you should. No one could blame you. You are one of the noblest men living. Without you I'd have been lost after my mother and father died. For you to say that—that John and I still—I won't say the word. You have no right to utter it when all is considered—you and me and the children. What right have you to—to think that you could know John's heart, when you have not seen him for eleven years? You may think you know mine. You may do so if you insist on making yourself unhappy, but you have no right to—to pass an opinion on—on the present feelings of my first husband. What are you going by, I'd like to know? You don't suppose that John would tell Mr. Cavanaugh such things, even if they were true? And how could Mr. Cavanaugh come to you, my husband, and—and even mention such a thing?"

Joel was on his feet also. The childlike and unconscious eagerness of his wife to make sure of the thing she was secretly craving stabbed him to the core of his being, and yet he told himself that it was his duty to withhold nothing concerning his rival from her.

"Reading him as I'd read myself," Joel answered. "I thought he'd remain constant, but to-day I wormed it out of Mr. Cavanaugh."

"Wormed what out—what out?" Tilly sank back into her chair, open-mouthed, her eyes gleaming portals to breathless expectancy. "You can't mean that Mr. Cavanaugh thinks—actually thinks that John still—?"

Joel bowed his head in the relentless starlight, sat down as from sheer frailty, and was silent. The undulating landscape, the fields, the meadows, the woodland, the hills and streams seemed to hold their vast breath with his. Suddenly Tilly rose. It was as if she were about to stand behind his chair, as was her wont at times, put her hands upon his shoulders, and kiss his thorn-crowned brow, but she did not. She went slowly into the cabin. He heard her feet—feet he knew to be winged with sudden, far-reaching joy—treading the boards as she went to the bed of the children. What was she doing? he wondered. Her step ceased. He pictured her as seated by the side of the children's bed. Was she pitying him or rejoicing? Why ask? He knew. And his love was so divine a thing that, but for his throes of death-agony, he could have rejoiced with her.

CHAPTER IX

"I didn't expect to see you out this way," she said. "Joel told me a couple of weeks ago that you'd gone off somewhere."

He nodded. It was difficult to introduce the topic on his mind, and he chatted with her about the land in the neighborhood, Joel's prospective crop, and the fear some of the farmers had of a harmful drought if rain did not fall within a week or so. He had not been able to come to the matter in hand when a sound outside was heard.

"Grandmother Trott," a small voice piped up, "sister won't come on. She keeps stopping and picking flowers and leaves."

Mrs. Trott laughed, and her face beamed. "It is Joel's children," she explained. "The little darlings come with milk for me every bright day. Tilly sends it."

Rising, she stood in the doorway. "Come on; but, no, Joie, don't pull her hand so hard! You might jerk her little arm out of joint. Come on by yourself. She will come when she feels like it."

The boy soon appeared with the pail of milk and set it in the door. "Mother said tell you she'd have some fresh butter for you in the morning and some eggs. The hens have started again. Tilly and I found six eggs in the hay last night. Grandmother, where are the kittens?"

"Right around behind the cabin, dearie," Mrs. Trott answered, taking the pail. "The mother-cat is nursing them in the sun. Show them to your little sister. You may have them when they are larger."

Cavanaugh heard the children as they went behind the house and bent over the cat and kittens. He heard them uttering endearing words to the animals. "Don't, don't, you little stupid!" Joel cried. "She may scratch you! Don't you see her claws?"

Mrs. Trott laughed softly as she emptied the pail and washed it out.

"They are the sweetest children in the world," she said to Cavanaugh, as she put the pail on the door-step and sat down again. "They stayed with me a week last month when Joel and Tilly went to camp-meeting over the mountain. They were not one bit of trouble, and, oh, I did love to have them about! I never let on to Tilly and Joel, but when they took the darlings away I was awfully blue. Short as the time was, you see, I got accustomed to them."

The children had gone home and still Cavanaugh had not reached the object of his visit. It was the shadow of vague wonderment in the widow's eyes, and her lagging talk, that compelled him to introduce it. He first spoke, and rather adroitly, of Todd Williams's encounter in New York with the man who resembled her son, and, pausing, he heard her sigh.

"Poor boy! poor boy!" she muttered, sadly. "And they said he and Dora were on the way to New York when that awful thing happened. Mr. Cavanaugh, you are a good man. You've always been considered a good man by everybody that knows you. I understand that you never had any children, but you may know the human heart well enough to know that no regret ever heard of can be deeper than that which is brought on by the sort of thing that happened to me. I don't talk this way to Tilly and Joel, because I owe them too much to let them dream that I am not thoroughly happy. But if I could live a thousand years I'd never be able to rid my mind of the positive knowledge that by—by—I will say it—I'll say it to you as I'd say it to a priest, if I was a Catholic. I've often wished I was one, so that I could let what I feel out of me. Maybe saying it like this to you will do a little good. I don't know, but I will say that nothing on earth can rid my mind of the fact that by my thoughtless way of acting when I was young I— I—"

"Stop! I know what you mean, my poor friend," Cavanaugh broke in, "and you are getting all wrought up. Listen to me. Why not look on the hopeful side, the bright side? How do you know but that John and Dora are still alive, and none the worse; in fact—"

He suddenly checked himself, for a sickly, greenish pallor had overspread the listener's face, and she leaned forward as if about to swoon. In a moment, however, she had recovered herself, and, sitting erect, her white, shapely hands pressed to her breast, she smiled feebly.

"Oh, I know what you mean, Mr. Cavanaugh. I did try that. I summed up every hope, everything that held out the slightest promise. I used to lie awake at night and declare over and over that it couldn't be—that the laws of life wouldn't let such an unjust thing happen to them, innocent as they were, and with their right to live, but it didn't do any good. I didn't let anybody know about it, but one after another I got three different papers with John's name in them. I went to Atlanta and visited the editors of all the papers and asked their advice. They were sorry, but they said the list had never been disputed and ought to have been even bigger than it was. Then I gave up."

A shrewd, half-fearful gleam was in the contractor's shifting eyes.

"I know, I know, Mrs. Trott," he gently persisted, "but many and many an account like that has turned out afterward to be incorrect. You don't know it, but maybe all three of those papers got their information from one report. You see, a reporter representing a lot of papers in a sort of combine goes to a spot like that was and his account is telegraphed all about over the country. So you see, even if you had seen it in a hundred papers you wouldn't have to take it as law and gospel."

Mrs. Trott slowly shook her head and moaned softly.

"I wonder if I dare tell her," Cavanaugh debated with himself. "She almost fainted just now. She may have a weak heart. I must be careful. I've heard of sudden joy killing." He was silent for a moment; then he began again: "Mrs. Trott, you are welcome to your opinion, and I reckon you'll let me have mine. But, to tell you the truth, I never have been fully convinced that John and Dora was lost in that wreck. I have my reasons, and they are pretty good ones."

He saw her arched brows meet in a little frown of polite wonderment, and she was about to speak when little Joel suddenly reappeared at the door.

"Oh, grandmother," he half lisped, in breathless haste, for he had been running, "I forgot to tell you what mother told me to say. She said for me to be sure not to forget. She said tell you that she is coming over after dinner to tell you the best news you ever heard."

"Ah, tell her I'm glad, darling!" Mrs. Trott said, with a smile. And she went and stooped down before the child and added: "Won't you give old grandmother a sweet little hug? There! there! that's a darling little man!" And Cavanaugh saw her pressing the boy to her breast and kissing his cheeks.

When the child had left she came back to her chair, her face filled with a rare maternal glow. "If you were a younger man, Mr. Cavanaugh, and childless, as you now are, I'd advise you to adopt children. I don't know why or how it is, but I know that persons can love other children than their own and love them deeply, too. I love Tilly's two— I really do. That child there, that little boy with all his cute ways and moods, takes me back to the childhood of my own son. But I neglected him. How I could have done it only God knows, but I did, and you know it better than any one else besides myself. You gave him a fine start, and if he had lived he would have made a great success. But I must stop— I must stop! I think I know what Tilly's good news is. Joel has been trying to rent the Marsden farm. He put in a bid for it. It is a big place, and Mr. Marsden furnishes supplies. Maybe Joel has got it. I hope so, for he is at the end of his rope."

"The good news is not for poor Joel, Mrs. Trott. The truth is that Tilly wants to tell you the same thing I've come to tell you. You know I said that I never was fully convinced about John. Now what if I was to tell you that I went to New York to make sure?"

"Make sure? Make sure that—that John—" she began and stopped.

He nodded, holding her bewildered stare by his fixed eyes. "I found out enough up there to be sure, Mrs. Trott."

"You mean that John— Why, you can't mean that—?"

Again he nodded. "I've been afraid to shock you with the good news, but he is alive and prospering. I was with him a week."

She was convinced. She sat white and limp. She put her thin hands to her face as if to hide her joy from him. He saw her breast heaving. He heard her sob in an effort to control her emotion, and then she became quiet.

That night at home Cavanaugh wrote a long letter to John. "Something must be done," he wrote, in one place. "If you had seen that transformed human soul as I saw her there in her lonely log hut and heard her talk of you and your babyhood and the thousands of regrets she has for what she has done and left undone, your kind heart would have melted with pity as mine did. My old mother's passed on, John, but if I could call her back I'd give my last breath to furnish her with a minute's joy. You could give yours years of comfort and happiness. Do you know what I'd do if I was you? I'd come here and get her and take her back to New York with me, and let her have some of the things she used to hunger for and which may have caused her to do as she did. She is poor; she needs you; the two good friends who have been helping her so long really haven't the means to keep it up. You must come—you really must. If you don't it will darken the end of your life. I love you too much to let you neglect this sublime duty. Men of the greatest brains have married repentant women and never regretted it; surely a man as noble as you are, and as able as you are, can afford to pardon the woman who gave him his very life."

Mrs. Cavanaugh read the letter when it was finished. She made no comment on it, but her opinion of her husband had never been so high. Deep pools of his inner being for the first time in his life were exposed to the light of her understanding.

"May I?" she asked, taking the pen into her hand, and laying his letter open on the table.

"Yes," he nodded. "Add anything you like."

"Dear John," she wrote on the margin, in the cramped style of one who writes but seldom, "come to your mother. Do as Sam says. He knows what is best."

CHAPTER X

Among the farmers of that locality it was considered somewhat beneath the dignity of the men to milk the cows, but Joel Eperson had never permitted his little wife to lay her hands to that particularly arduous part of the day's duties. And to-night at dusk he was at this work in the stable-yard, Tilly and the children still being at Mrs. Trott's cabin. He knew why his wife had gone there, and painfully he was comprehending why she was so late in getting back. There would naturally be much to say on a subject like that by the two women in all the world whom such a startling revelation touched so closely. Joel took his pail of milk into the cabin. He put some more wood into the stove that it might be hot and ready for use when Tilly arrived, and then he walked to and fro in the yard, his dull eyes on the dewy fields. On his right, a half-mile distant, the fires of the lime-kilns and brickyards were beginning to glow against the cliffs in the coming darkness, and the songs of the negro stokers and the thwacks of their axes fell on his ears. He emptied the water in the pail and brought up some more from the spring at the foot of the slope. Still his family did not come, and he started out to meet them. He crossed the meadow, skirted his corn, which till only the other day he had looked on with pride, walked between the rows of his cotton-plants to curtail the distance, and finally reached the wood through which ran the path to Mrs. Trott's cabin. As he stood there for a moment he heard voices. Both Tilly and Mrs. Trott were speaking, but he could not see them for the thickened darkness beneath the trees.

"I must hurry now." It was Tilly's voice, and it rang with the lilting tones of triumphant joy. "It is late. Joel will be looking for me."

"Yes, I'll turn back," Mrs. Trott was heard saying. "Let me kiss them once more. Oh, I am so wonderfully happy! Really, dear girl, I'd like to die feeling as I do to-night. You see, I never expected it— I never dreamt that such a thing could be possible. I thought all chance of ever begging his forgiveness was gone, and now maybe, some day or other, I can. I wouldn't ask him to take me back, you understand, but only to say that he wouldn't hold it against me the rest of his life. But I'd want him to know one thing, Tilly, my sweet child, and that is the things you have done for me on account of—on account of—you know what I mean?"

"Hush, grandmother," Tilly answered, in the tremulous tone which indicated emotions firmly checked. "You must not forget who I now am. You must not forget that I'm the mother of those darling children."

"No, my child, nor can I forget their noble father. I wouldn't wound him for the whole world. I love him as—as—yes, I love him as much as I do John, but in a different way, that is all. John was my baby, Joel is my grown-up son. You must never forsake Joel in thought, word, or act. Remember that."

What Tilly answered Joel refused to hear. He was too honorable a man to listen further, and he turned back and with slow, weighty steps reached his home again. He stood in the kitchen doorway, waiting. He heard Tilly and the children coming. They were singing merrily and romping like sprites across the meadow.

"I'm coming! I'm coming! I'll catch you! Boo!" Tilly cried. "Hide from him, darling—hide behind the bushes! Where is she, brother? She must be lost. Oh, there she is!" This was followed by childish screams of delight and the mother's cooing words.

Joel went to meet them, advancing across the yard and taking little Tilly into his arms.

"I know we are late," his wife said, regretfully, "but grandmother came part of the way back, and you know she walks slowly."

"It is all right," Joel said, pressing little Tilly's cheek to his. "It is not very late."

"Well, I'll hurry with the supper," Tilly answered. It was significant, he reflected, that she did not mention then the reception of the startling news by Mrs. Trott. Even while they all sat at the table Tilly failed to bring it up, and a general air of repression brooded over them.

Indeed, the children had been put to bed, the dishes washed, and husband and wife were alone together in the moonlight at the door, and still the subject in the minds of both had been avoided. He wondered if she expected him to mention the matter. Surely she ought to know that it was not exactly the thing that he, a mere outsider, had the right to pry into. An awkward silence fell between them, the sort of silence that surely boded ill for their future harmony of intercourse. Tilly seemed to sense this, and suddenly put her shoulder to the wheel of duty.

"I didn't get to tell grand— I didn't get to tell Mrs. Trott, after all." It was significant that she abruptly discarded a formerly accepted term of endearment. "Mr. Cavanaugh was there this morning for that purpose, so—so the greater part of her excitement was over when I got there."

"But she was happy, of course," Joel got out, well knowing that his remark was an empty one.

"Oh yes, of course." Tilly was silent for several minutes. Then she added: "The poor woman is afraid that John will not forgive her. She doesn't want help from him, she declares, and she thinks it would be unwise for them ever again to meet face to face, but she says she would like for him to know how sorry she is for many things. I think, myself, Joel, that it would be inadvisable for—for them to meet, just at present, anyway. Don't you?"

"I don't know. I can't say. I'm not in a position to decide," Joel floundered. "It would depend on him. It is unfortunate that so many miles separate them. He evidently has some established way of living into which she might not fit so well. The mere fact of his being still alive reached her by accident and through no effort on his part."

"I'm sure she has no idea of making any advancement." Tilly seemed to Joel, as she spoke, quite another woman from the one who had been his wife all those years, and Joel simply sat, bent forward, his every nerve and muscle drawn taut by vast swirling forces within him.

"Then you don't think that he would—would forgive her?" asked Tilly, with obvious anxiety which she was striving to minimize.

Joel's prompt reply surprised her. "I know he would," said Joel, "if he knew all the circumstances. I have never known a nobler man. I don't believe a nobler man ever lived. In trying to help his mother I was only doing what I was sure he would have done for me under the same conditions. If I only knew how to show him what his mother now is I'd do it."

They were silent for a while; then, suddenly, Tilly stood behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. "Joel," she said, "you are blue to-night." She toyed with the hair on his brow; she bent almost as low as when in that posture she sometimes kissed him, but she did not kiss him to-night, and he noted the fact as a man dying unattended in a dungeon might test his own pulse. He longed to take the little hand so close to his cheek and press it to his famished lips, but something told him that she would (not openly, but inwardly) now actually shrink from such a caress.

"No, don't think I am blue," he protested, fighting forward on his black billows, and grimly smiling. "You are happy and I shall be for your sake. You mustn't observe my cranky ways too closely. I'm all right."

"Somehow I can't exactly believe it." Tilly twisted a lock of his hair between her slow, reluctant fingers. "You seem changed, a little, anyway, and I think we ought to come to a thorough understanding right now. You have an imagination, Joel. You used to write poetry to me, you remember, and for all I know you may now be fancying all sorts of really absurd things. Now be sensible. John and I did love each other away back there, but we were parted and for years I have thought of him as dead. But now he is away off up there, and I am here with you and our darling children. You love them, they love you—and—and you love me, and I—love you. Now be sensible. Can you, even with a crazy flight of your imagination, fancy that John and I ever again will or could be—be like we once were? Throw the idea away if you have it. Of course, I must be happy in discovering that my hasty desertion back there did not cost him his life and Dora's. Oh, that thought worried me! I never let you know how much it worried me! I guess I would have married you much sooner than I did if I had not had that on my mind. But all that is past and gone now. I'm here and John is away off up there. Your idea that he still loves me is ridiculous on the face of it. What was I, even when he was here? Only an ignorant country girl, while he has no doubt grown and learned and altered in a thousand ways. I've seen successful men from big cities. They don't seem to think as we do, or act or speak like us. I'd be a silly dowdy to such a man. I think, of course, if it comes about naturally, that his mother ought to go to him, but I don't think he ever ought to—to come back here, and I am sure that he won't. I am sure of that—I'm sure of it. He has been burnt once, as the saying is, and that will be enough. But I predict that she will go to him. No, I'll take that back. I said that, but I am not sure. Do you know, it is God's truth, Joel, that the sweet old soul loves you and me and the children so much now that she would not leave us even—even for John. She let that out this afternoon while Tilly was sleeping in her lap. The very thought of going started her to crying, and it was some time before I got her quiet."

Tilly's hand actually touched his neck, but Joel still felt that he had no right to clasp it. The wild thought of grasping it and drawing his wife's lips down to his possessed him, but he promptly killed the impulse. Grimly he told himself that he would be fondling a shadow, feasting on a husk.

Suddenly she drew her hand away. "I'm awfully tired to-night," she sighed. "I'll go to bed, but you needn't hurry. Shall I fill your pipe?"

"No, thank you," he said, rising as courteously as of old. "I sha'n't smoke any more to-night."

"Well, good night," she said.

"Good night," he echoed.

The flare from the lime-kilns and the brickyards lit the cliffs, hills, and sky. He beard the town clock striking ten. Little Joel had waked, and his mother was gently telling him to go to sleep. The child wanted water. Tilly went to the kitchen for it, and the father heard her sweetly cooing as she held the cup for his son to drink. What a marvel that—his son and hers.

CHAPTER XI

"Man that you are," she sniffed, "you don't see what ails him. He doesn't once mention Tilly, but in every line there he is thinking of her and her happiness. He'd love to come back here and see the old place and all of us, but he is afraid it will upset Tilly. You said you thought he still loves her— I know he does. I can see it all through that letter, and I'm sorry for him, poor fellow!"

"Oh, I see what you mean," Cavanaugh said, in a mollified tone, "and I believe you are right, too. He was thinking of her happiness when he ran away, and he is doing it now. Yes, yes, he still loves her. I saw it in a hundred ways when me and him was together up there. He never had room for but one woman in his heart, and she fills it still. She is the drawback in the case, I'll bet. He thinks she is happy with Joel and the children and he doesn't want to break in at this late day. But he will come. Mark my words, he will come to help his mother when I write him more fully. I'll explain, too, that I'll keep it from the papers, and when he gets here he can stay out here with us and keep away from old acquaintances as much as he likes. Yes, he will come."

It ended in accordance with this prediction. One evening at dusk John arrived in town and was delivered by a street-hack at Cavanaugh's door. He was received with open arms by the old couple and treated as a much-loved son. And he was glad that he came. For the first time since the departure of Dora and the loss of Binks he felt restful and at home. The delightful old-fashioned room, filled with the very perfume of cleanliness, to which he was assigned, at once charmed and soothed him. Till late that night the three friends sat talking on the porch. Several times Mrs. Trott was mentioned, but Tilly not once. That she and Joel lived near by and had been the widow's stanch friends John was not yet aware, and the Cavanaughs wondered, half fearfully, what effect that knowledge would have on their guest.

John was waked the next morning by the long, resonant blowing of the whistles at the mills. It was scarcely light, and, only partly conscious at first, he fancied that it was his old signal for rising. He thought he was in his dismal room at his mother's house, and that little ragged Dora was clattering about in the kitchen below. Slowly he came to full comprehension and lay back on his bed and closed his eyes. But it was not to sleep. What a tangle of sordid memories wrapped him about! How profoundly wise, by comparison, had he become! He wondered if the tiny cottage in which he and Tilly had passed those few days of blinded bliss were still extant. If so, would he dare visit it? He thought not. Neither would he care to see again his mother's old home.

Later, when the sun was up, he heard Cavanaugh on the porch, and he rose, dressed, and joined him. Presently breakfast was announced. How the cozy table in its snowy expanse appealed to him—the food he used to like, the open door looking out on a flower-garden, a plot of dewy grass, and a row of beehives! He had a sense of wanting to live that way always. He was weary of the life that he had just left, and the ephemeral things he had won. His desire for rest was that of an old man whose years are spent. Somehow he felt that he and the Cavanaughs were on a par as to age and experience. They had suffered mildly through long lives—he had suffered keenly in a shorter one.

It was understood between him and Cavanaugh that the first thing to be done was for him to visit his mother. So, when breakfast was over, they fared forth in the cool, brisk air for that walk in the country. As they neared the cabin Cavanaugh saw Joel's house in the distance. He might have descried either Joel or Tilly about the place by careful looking, but was afraid that even a glance in that direction might attract John's attention. Presently Mrs. Trott's cabin was before them, and, leaving his companion in the edge of the wood, Cavanaugh went ahead to prepare the widow for the surprise before her. Presently he came back.

"I must say she was awfully excited," he began. "I was sorry for her. She turned as white as a sheet and shook powerful; but she wants to see you, and said tell you to come right on. Now you know the way home, John, and so I'll turn back."

"A cabin—a mere log cabin, such as the poorest negroes live in!" John reflected, and yet it was the abode of the woman who used to demand so many luxuries, and that woman, looked at from any angle, was his mother. He was conscious of no tenderness or pity. Those things were reserved for the instant of his first view of her. Great soul that he was, it required but the downcast eyes of the repentant woman to melt him into streams of sympathy when she appeared in the low doorway, a pitiful flush of embarrassment struggling out of the pallor of her cheeks and surrounding her still beautiful eyes.

"Mother!" he cried, huskily, and he advanced to her, his arms outstretched. "I had to come to you. I heard you were in need, but I didn't know it was like this."

She seemed unable to say a word. She hid her shamed face, her childlike face, so full of timid remorse, on his shoulder, and he felt her sobs shaking her breast. He led her to a chair inside the cabin and gently eased her down to it, his fingers, filially hungry for the first time in his life, gently and consolingly playing about her hair and brow.

Presently she found her voice. "I was afraid you'd never come," she faltered, still with that shrinking humility which had so completely won him to her. "But here you are. Oh, I don't know what to say, John— I don't know what to say, except that I am not the same silly woman I used to be. I used to think that the way I lived when you was here was the only way I could live, but now I'd rather die than take back a single day of it. Strange as it may seem, I like this. I like the still woods out there, the rocks, grass, and wild flowers, and being alone. Yes, I like to be all alone. When I'm all alone, even in the dead of night, something seems to come to me and pity me and give me the sweetest rest and peace. There wasn't but one thing that haunted me, and that was thinking you were dead. When I heard that was a mistake I felt very happy, though I didn't think I'd ever see you again."

It seemed to him, as he sat in that crude hut, that nothing stranger had ever happened to him than seeing her in such surroundings.

"Is it possible," he asked, "that you spend the nights here in this place?"

"For six years now, winter and summer." She smiled wistfully. "I've got my little garden behind the cabin, and my chickens and my cats, and they keep me busy. Then I read a lot of books and stories. The Cavanaughs send them to me off and on, and—and"—she started visibly—"some other people do, too."

"Other people?" he repeated to himself. "Then she has friends, after all."

Presently a patter of feet sounded outside and a child's voice came in at the open door. "Grandmother Trott! Where are you?"

"Here, here!" Mrs. Trott called out in a flurried tone. She made a start as if to rise, and yet it seemed to John that she had lost the power to move. Then a little boy appeared at the door, two tin pails in his hands. "Here's the milk, grandmother, and some fresh butter. Mother said keep the pie and biscuits warm. She just took them from the stove before I started. Grandmother, sister wants to see the kittens. May she?"

"Yes, yes, of course." Mrs. Trott, still agitated, got up. Little Tilly was now in the doorway, and she took her into her arms. As for Joel, he had espied one of the kittens, and was crossing the room after it, when for the first time he saw John and paused, somewhat abashed.

"Come here." John smiled, holding out his hands, and the boy went to him trustingly. "My, my! what a solid boy you are!" John went on, taking him on his knee. "How old are you?"

"Six, and sister's four," was the answer.

Mrs. Trott, still with the look of concern on her face, was putting Tilly down, that she might empty the pails, and while her back was turned the little girl crept confidingly to John's disengaged knee. With a laugh, he took her up also. He was strongly drawn to them both, and why he couldn't have said, unless it was because they were friends of his mother and had given her such an endearing appellation.

Mrs. Trott brought the pails back. She still wore an embarrassed look, which, in his preoccupation over the children, he failed to note.

"They are very nice and friendly," he smiled up at her, an arm about the body of each child. "Whose are they?"

"Now you must go back," Mrs. Trott said, with obvious evasion, holding out the pails to Joel. "Tell your mother that I am very much obliged."

"But mother said we must rest awhile here and not come right back," the boy answered, leaning on John's shoulder.

"No. I's tired, grandmother." Tilly drew back also into her snug retreat. "Where's the tittens, brother?"

But Joel could see kittens any day, and John was now showing him his new gold watch and chain and Tilly was admiring his scarf and pin, daintily touching the rich silk with her tiny sun-browned fingers.

With something like a sigh of resignation Mrs. Trott sank into her chair and listened to the chat of the trio. That her son was charmed with the children of his former wife she saw plainly. What would he do or say when told the truth?—and that it was due him to be told she did not doubt.

"They are beautiful and lovely," John said, when they both left his lap and went behind the cabin to see the kittens. "Whose children are they?"

"I see that I must tell you and be done with it," Mrs. Trott said, with a warm flush. "Can't you guess?"

"Why, how could I guess?" he asked, wonderingly. "They call you grandmother, too—how is that?"

"John," she gulped, "they are Tilly's and Joel's!"

His moving lips seemed to frame the words she had spoken, but without the issue of sound. They were both silent for an awkward pause; then he said, haltingly, "I did not know that they were in this neighborhood."

"Mr. Cavanaugh told me that you didn't know about them and me," she answered, all but apologetically. "Oh, John, I hope you won't blame me, but I simply could not have lived without them! They are responsible for what I now am. They came to my aid immediately after you were reported dead, and have stuck to me ever since."

"Then they are the friends Sam mentioned!" John said.

"Yes, they are the ones. They wanted me to come live with them after they married, but I couldn't— I simply couldn't; but I did consent to live near them like this, and I am glad, for they have been like loving children to me. John, you don't know how noble and unselfish poor Joel is. Nothing has ever prospered with him. He has always had bad luck, and yet he never thinks of himself. I was with Tilly when both her children were born. She seems now like a daughter, and Joel a son. As for the little ones, I love them with all my heart. I owe it to you to tell you the truth. Had I thought you alive, of course, I could not have been so intimate with them, but we all three thought you were dead, and, somehow, drifted together."

"I know, and that is all right," John said, a shadow of his old brooding despair in his eyes. The prattle of the children behind the house came to his ears. Through the doorway the midday sun beat yellow and warm on a crude bed of flowers close by. Mrs. Trott continued her recital of past happenings. She told even of Tilly's visit to the old house; of her occupying his room, of her own and Joel's vigil on the outside. She spoke of the saddened years in which Tilly had refused to think of marriage, and how she herself had worked with Joel to bring it about.

"If I knew one thing," she presently said, gravely studying his face, "I might feel that I had a right to tell you something particular about Tilly. I mean if I knew one certain thing about you yourself."

"Me myself?" he cried, groping for her meaning.

"Yes, you, John. Mr. Cavanaugh hinted at what he thought your present feeling for Tilly is, but I'd have to know for myself before—before I'd feel at liberty to tell you what I have in mind. Mr. Cavanaugh said you hadn't said so in so many words, but that he was sure that you still feel the same toward Tilly that you did before you and her parted."

He had lowered his head. He now interlaced his fingers between his knees, and she saw them shaking.

"She is the same and more to me," he said. "As long as I live I shall love her."

"Do you really mean that, John?"

"Yes, and much more," he answered, firmly. "I don't blame her for anything that she has done. She had every right to marry. I counted on it happening even earlier."